The assorted rag-tag group of guys were loud, at least. Too loud almost; as if they were trying to make up for the lack of strippers or suburban drugs. From the back steps I heard a loud cheer from inside and wondered absently who was winning at beer pong. Most likely Jasper, years of practice and a craving for attention and drink tended to bring out the sportsman in him. The door behind me creaked and I felt the shifting of weight over the cheap wooden decking.
'I thought you were quitting for the wedding,' Charlie's tone was only slightly reproachful as he indicated the cigarette between my shaking fingers with a jerk of his head. I shrugged non-committedly and dropped it to the dirt as he heaved himself down to sit beside me on the steps. 'Don't worry yourself about it son, everyone needs a vice.'
I could not help but glance at the paunch of his gut, pushing at his straining belt and the beer in his hand. It seemed that some people had more than one. I ground the cigarette down under the sole of my shoe and thought of Bella.
Eventually Charlie blew a long breath and spoke, 'She will be your wife soon, and I am trusting you to take care of her. I never made a fuss over your dating and I won't make a fuss now. Just know that I am trusting you here, okay, and if you mess up there will be a whole lot of people ready to take your place and give you a good kicking once they've done it.' He paused and swallowed loudly. 'That being said, I think you two are going to be just fine. And, and you know where I am, and what I can do if you ever need a favour.' With that, he reached up a hand and hoisted himself into standing, with the support of the railing.
Stumbling only a little, he made his way back towards the kitchen door. What he could do? I would have to assume that was a reference to his job, though I failed to envision an occasion where I would need someone to be booked for parking illegally or school kids warned over petty theft. Just the big talk of a drunken man. I shrugged off my jacket and allowed the breeze to wash over me for just a little while.
The gathering was sedate in the sense that there was no typical stag night antics, but true to form, the men there were slowly drinking themselves into incoherent stupors. It was evident that I was the only one not drinking the moment I stepped into the house.
There was a card game in the kitchen that Charlie looked to be winning comfortably. Emmett winked at me as I passed by in an act of misplaced comradeship against my soon to be father-in-law. I sighed inwardly but smirked at my brother, happy he was smiling. The Chief, though drunk, wasn't stupid and knew when he was being allowed to win. But despite that, he wasn't going to point it out either.
The living room was busier. Mike Newton was talking about business defensively. I paused long enough to gather that it was his response to being called a 'glorified cashier' by Sam. A rather heavy insult from someone who was approaching his 26th consecutive year of unemployment. According to Bella, little Mike Newton was running the shop now, and doing it well. Sam knew about Mike's father and his illness, but it was difficult to tell if it was the drink or his natural disposition that had left him so utterly devoid of empathy.
I kept going and reached the front door where Tyler was sitting hunched over on the bottom step of the stairs and talking, I assumed by the tone, to his mother. 'Come on,' I heard him whine, 'half 1 at the latest, I promise.' That boy desperately needed to move out; he was 22 years old for Christ's sake. The phone snapped shut as I fumbled with the keys at the front door and I swore at myself. I shouldn't have stopped to listen. 'Awesome party Edw-', I moved fast and hit the grass before the screen door had even banged shut behind me.
The streamers and burst balloons strewn over the lawn, had contorted under the moonlight untill there was nothing left of a party in them. I blinked twice, transfixed by the carnage on the untended lawn and passed on. The littered yard told too many stories.
Jasper had arrived late with expensive cigars in one hand and a clinking plastic bag in the other. He parked too far from the kerb and left his door open as he tottered up to the house. I could only pray that Bella's father would either be lenient tonight, or not notice the alcohol on his breath as I parked my oldest friend's car.
Almost immediately he had pronounced the colourful decorations so thoughtfully arranged, as 'queerer than even you Eddie-boy' before they had been torn from the walls amidst drunken cheers from old friends. He did it with humour, but there was an undercurrent of pure aggression that had held me back. It was well received by the crowd though. He had always been a showman.
I had fought against the urge to remind him that it had been Alice and Rosalie who had hung the banners from the banister in the hall and tied balloons to the lighting fixtures. Sometimes he was just a jerk and I don't think he even knew why. It was Alice who you had to feel sorry for really. An alcoholic husband, ruined from a bitter divorce and a kid who hated her you from his previous marriage. That was the American dream right there. Though, at least, they were together again.
I reached for my lighter and swore again softly into the night. There was simply no way I would be returning to fetch it from my jacket pocket. I shivered against the turning weather and kept walking.
At the bottom of Bella's street, I cut through a garden and vaulted the fence at the fringe of the grass behind the house. Moving almost silently and knowing no one was watching, I had never felt more alone. The moonlight that had lit up the sleepy suburb at the front of the houses was sparse at the back. The trees were denser as I moved further towards the thick of the forest and it could not filter through the small silhouettes in the leaves. The looming trunks around me where just blackened pillars to my eyes, but the setting felt familiar as my feet cut through the undergrowth. I continued on, weaving through the path I knew was hidden only by the night.
She eventually appeared beside me; joining the path from the direction of my house and clasping my hand with cold fingers. Neither of us spoke and as I pulled her closer I felt goosebumps ghosting over her arms. She gave away nothing; her face an eerily calm, blank mask of detachment. Sometimes she just seemed too unreachable, her mind in an impenetrable force and her body stiff and unrelenting under my hands.
Sometimes, I would spend hours and hours of our time together so sure that she was finally going to snap. She would look at me and finally break away from me, from Charlie, from Forks. She would recall her love and leave. My paranoia however, was always crueller than she ever could be. It was just her way of dealing with all the things that haunted her in this little town. I would have dreams that she was gone sometimes and then when I saw her in the morning or picked her up for work; my relief at seeing her would be so strong it was all I could do to not let her go again. Charlie had got it wrong about the vice thing. Mine definitely wasn't the overpriced tobacco that I really bought to help waste away the hours she wasn't beside me. My vice was Bella.
We reached the invisible border and sat down. The state line which separated Forks from the rest of the world was comforting and a reminder of the things that made us who we were. Our first kiss together had happened against the tree I was resting my back against when we were 14. The first time she had told me she loved me, the first time I had seen her cry, the time she had agreed, finally, to marry me. And, the last night before our wedding, we would complete a final first.
In a fit of delirious adventure at the age of 14; on our first day off school for the summer, we had pilfered a map from Charlie's collection in the kitchen drawer and taken off into the forest. We purposefully strode to what Bella saw to be our goal. She was obsessed with finding the very edge of our confinement.
It was so if we ever wanted to cross that line we could, Bella had explained through difficult breaths, as we marched onward to the line, that had sparked a million aspirations. She was so fascinated with the idea of us crossing it together and being somewhere else. Of existing outside of tiny fractured town; that even then, she grudgingly called home. And I, in turn, was fascinated by her.
We had walked and walked, consumed by fantasies of escape of what we knew to be an already very dreary adolescence. It was by accident that we had discovered the meadow. I was holding the map, but had spent more time admiring the mesmerising sway of her shiny, brown hair that reached her curved waist than tracking our route. All I knew was that we were wildly off course and I didn't care. I would have followed her forever if I could, content just to hear the excited chatter of her voice and follow her sweet strawberry smell.
She was always the realist of our pairing however and soon the steady chatter had evolved over the course of the afternoon to outraged shouting over my complete lack of navigational skills. It was then, as she laid a feeble but passionate shove to my arm that we had, quite literally, stumbled across our meadow.
It was breathtaking in the summer, with flowers in bloom and lazy, swollen bees bobbing up and down amongst long grass. I had stood bewitched, watching Bella spinning in delighted circles under the strong and seemingly omnipresent sun. That summer had stretched 12 glorious weeks, and every day after our discovery we had known that not one would compete with our first day there together. The day she had picked flowers and showered us both in petals. The day she had held my hand, so shyly, on the way back and had looked away from me every time she blushed. The day I had come to see that there would never be any other girl in my life who I wouldn't compare to this girl, this childhood crush.
I wouldn't let myself even think the word love, not until I knew I would have the courage to say it. It was dusk when we left, both of us grass stained and smiling. She held the map despite my weak protestations and set our course in the quick and efficient way I knew she would. She told me I would never be a boy scout and we had laughed.
That summer when we were 14, our innocent flirting had kept me awake at nights. All we had really done that day was walk about 2 miles and return in a massive sweeping loop. Our walk home was much shorter, whether due to our location or my impending departure from her I didn't know. She dropped my hand at the end of the path and yelled over her shoulder she would see me tomorrow as she ran for her house. The whole way home I had felt the soft squeeze of her fingers, so warm in my own.
Over time the meadow became the refuge she had been searching for that day. The path that led from the other side of the meadow outwards became that state line I could never help her find. I had never crossed it and neither had she. I began to wonder if I was one of the people who would have stopped her and whether I had become one of the people she wanted her exit hidden from.
But after everything we had done, and everything I knew one day we would be together, I still felt like the awkward boy who barely knew the beautiful girl. She moved to her knees and began pulling items from her jacket pockets – a necklace, a stack of papers held together by an elastic band, a Polaroid photo, a key chain, a bottle of pills. Small items continued to fall until the ground was littered with mementos from Bella's past.
There was a silence; as deep and immense as the space between our bodies I knew, like that day, I could not navigate alone. The surrounding darkness cloaked us both and I wished I could see her face to know how to react. All that existed was blackness and the steady thump of my heart measuring the time in loud and fast beats.
'That's everything'. Her voice was hollow as I surveyed the scene before me. She looked away fast, and I understood. Like Charlie's lawn, it told too many stories. We worked well, despite the dark and the hard and unyielding ground, scooping damp dirt with our hands and prising out small rocks with ripping nails.
She dropped the objects in the small hole a few at a time and packed it. The ground was pressed under her fists and covered in the loose dirt and debris of the rest of the path. It was obvious she didn't want to find this spot again, even if she looked.
We were stood at the end of the gray and gravel path that gave way at our feet to the expanse of the forest behind us, when she finally spoke again. 'Edward,' she said, her voice little more than a whimper, 'Will it get better?' She was pleading with me and I felt my throat tighten in response. What could I possibly say to her? Her scuffing feet and palms against my chest jolted me and in a moment of panic I threw my arms around her.
'Bella, Bella, Bella,' I found myself repeating as I breathed in the smell of her and felt her small and fragile frame. She felt so breakable against me and I knew she still was not eating nearly enough. She shrugged against my locked arms before relenting and letting me hug her. The distance she created from people could not shield her forever.
We ended the night that way, standing at the fringe of the trees while she sobbed quietly into my chest. Even as her tears soaked through my shirt, I knew it would not be this time, it would not be then that we crossed the line. But I could feel it building, the insurmountable tension that would one day drag us across it, willing or not. I could only hope it would take us together.
I stroked her back until she calmed and tried not to acknowledge the spiked knobs in her spine. She fled when she was finally composed ; just turned on the path and disappeared in the direction she came. I stumbled back, tripping over fallen branches and invisible obstacles. My breathing was wrong, and it reminded me of how she had cried; with such abandon, safe in the knowledge I would never mention it.
Charlie was asleep when I returned; sprawled out on the sofa and silent, in that way similar to how his daughter was now. The rest of the party had fallen away, due to the free flowing drink, the late hour, or Charlie's demand, I did not know. I returned to the kitchen to see the one picture that remained in the house.
Missed by either Charlie or Bella, a single grainy shot was left in a small frame on the kitchen window ledge behind the sink. Her brace was prominent as she grinned without the embarrassment or self consciousness that at 13 I had often felt myself. I looked at it under the florescent light of the kitchen, searching for any trace of what I normally saw in her eyes. Bella was not looking at the camera though, distracted by something happening out of shot. That, at least, was something I was familiar with.